If the legal marketing strategy for your law firm is based on online marketing, niche marketing to particular industries, traditional advertising, or just retaining and growing a share of your stable of clients, you will need to generate content.
Content is an essential dynamic of legal marketing, without it you may as well not have a law firm marketing plan. But producing content is hard work, and you should make the most of the writing that you manage to produce. Here are some quick ideas to help you use the two most commonly produced types of legal marketing content as best you can.
Law Firm Marketing – Written material (blogs, email alerts, brochures, guides, information sheets)
If you have written some worthwhile, interesting material of any of the forms above, you don’t need to just send it off once or print it and leave it to sit in your reception area. You should distribute that content as widely as possible. For every item of writing you produce, consider:
- Have I sent it to as many, relevant, clients as possible?
- Has it been loaded onto my website?
- Have I emailed it directly to referrers, associates and other professionals?
- Have I linked it with a post on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter?
- Has it been sent to media contacts?
- Are others in the firm aware of it and can they explain it in detail if a client has queries about it?
- Can I turn it into another kind of content and distribute in a different forum?
Law Firm Marketing – Presentations
Presentations are usually written with a particular reception in mind, or because of a particular request. Therefore they are often presented only once then left to become stale. The large amount of time involved in preparing them gets just one presentation. If you want to get much more benefit from your presentation consider:
- Who else can I present it to?
- How could I let the most people know about it?
- Have I mentioned it on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and suggested that I present it to others?
- Is it relevant to send the presentation in hard copy to those who were unable to attend the seminar?
- Could I record an audio or video of the presentation and distribute it via email or directly?
- Can I write an article or blog to discuss topics that arose from the presentation?
- Have I followed up with additional content to all the people who attended the presentation?
Although a lot of these ideas might feel like additional work at a time when you’ve possibly damaged your monthly billings with the amount of time you spent preparing the first lot of material, it is necessary to consider that it’s much easier to use a tiny amount of time now to really impact on the impression you’ve already produced than it is to produced a completely new piece of legal marketing material.
Increase the benefits of all the time and effort you put into law firm marketing and you’ll see that the next time you need to create content you’ll feel more confident about how effective that content will be.
John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.